Action cameras are typically fixed focus, rugged, ‘bullet’ style cameras that allow hands-free shooting of sporting activities. Some require an AV-in capable camcorder while others are standalone units – like the Oregon Scientific AT2K.

Adobe’s Premiere might be fighting tooth and nail in an aggressive market of prosumer editing software, but its compositing suite, After Effects, seems unruffled. That’s not to say that there aren’t competitors. Discreet’s Combustion, for example, is a great compositing tool with an interface that many find more intuitive.

Corel inherited its Photo Album software when it bought Jasc, but now it's knocked the name on the head and made the move to SnapFire Plus version 1, seemingly in response to Google's Picasa

If you received a digital camera for Christmas, it will have come with its own basic editing software. While this will be fine for the basics, you may find you'll soon outgrow it. Serif PhotoPlus X2 is the next logical step, as it's an introductory product that has plenty of tools to help you develop your skills.

For users of versions of Studio 8 and upwards, we were promised a more stable and reliable editing platform with fewer bugs and niggles than we’ve become used to in the past. So, does Studio 11 deliver on its promises?

As much as the large DVD authoring companies pride themselves on their full DVD burning suites, the most common recording and compression of videos is for YouTube and the iPod.

TechSmith is a company with its sights set on large and small businesses that have a need for capturing their computer screens as stills or videos. The flagship products of SnagIt and Camtasia get bigger and better, but also cheaper.

There's only one Photoshop. Others have tried but failed to topple it from the throne of best graphics editing application, but Photoshop remains the king. So it's not surprising that the next version, Photoshop CS3, has been hotly anticipated...

The original version of Premiere was a proper brain-teaser. Built for professional video editors and multimedia developers, it was power-packed and full of features, and came with a steep learning curve

Photoshop Elements 5 benefits from an excellent photo organiser, smart enough to detect and remove red-eye as it imports your images. It's supremely easy to tag files, organise them into collections and find the shots you need.

Much as we love Photoshop, it's primarily a way to edit existing artwork rather than creating art from scratch. Traditionally, if you wanted to do a painting or drawing on your Mac, you turned to Corel Painter, but now there's a new kid on the block: ArtRage.

Some of the latest cameras, like the Casio EX-Z1200, offer as much as 12Mp resolution, so why would you want more? For one thing, most only have a 3x optical zoom lens, so you can find yourself wanting to crop in and enlarge small areas of photos

Roxio's Crunch is another program designed to fill a gap in the market that Apple has left wide open for no well explored reason. In essence, the problem is that Apple TV and the video iPod will only play movies encoded in particular formats

Why is it that when you enlarge and print a photo that looks great onscreen, you end up with a mess? Edges become saw-toothed lines, and your image is marred by JPEG artefacts - big square blocks that make up colour in low resolution images

Almost two years ago, with much wailing and gnashing of teeth from the web design community, Adobe acquired multimedia software developer and rival Macromedia. Flash was the pinnacle of its portfolio but now it has the Adobe badge on the box

From its birth 20 years ago as a Pagemaker lookalike, Serif 's PagePlus has gone on to be a major player in the home and small-business DTP market, selling rather more copies than its progenitor

Have you ever thought of starting your own website? Well, for the asking price of a not-unreasonable £35, Mr Site gives you everything you need to design, set up and do just that. It even comes with a URL of your choice

Wanting to run your own Web site is one thing. Actually acquiring the means to make this happen is quite another. Mr Site's Takeaway website claims to provide everything you could need to do just that.

No, that's not a misprint, TMPGEnc 4.0 Express really does cost more than three times as much as the competition. Even though it only reads .avi, .mpeg, .wmv and .mov files, and writes .avi, .mpeg and .wmv. So what do you get for your money?